Wild Talents (with linked TOC)

This ebook is complete with linked Table of content making navigation quicker and easier.Wild Talents is the fourth and final nonfiction book written by paranormal author Charles Fort, published in 1932. In recounting a wide variety of odd phenomena, Fort largely disregards his previous teleportation theory, or at least incorporates him into his new thesis. Rather than a vague "Cosmic joker", as he postulated in his earlier books, the responsibility for these occurrences are freak powers that occur in the human mind, that cannot be naturally developed, but are there, Fort feels, as a sort of throwback to primeval times.Fort discusses many topics he had touched on before, though generally in more detail than in his other works - poltergeists, spontaneous human combustion, animal mutilations, vampires, and ghosts - along with many supposed cases of psychokinesis and ability to control one's surroundings. His thesis is that in primeval times, man needed such extraordinary powers in order to survive in the wilderness, and that all people can potentially develop these powers if they literally put their mind to it. He also explores alleged cases of witchcraft and murder by mental suggestion, compiling an impressive list of "occult criminology" (people apparently being murdered under peculiar or unexplainable circumstances) in support. He also attacks the general sense of taboo which he feels prevents wild talents from being accepted, and suggests that such "talents" would become acceptable if science would deem them as such.Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena.Fort's relationship with the study of anomalous phenomena is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. For over thirty years, Charles Fort sat in the libraries of New York and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that lay outside the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.Fort took thousands of notes in his lifetime. In his short story "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman," published many years later for the first time by the International Fortean Organization in issue #70 of the "INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown", Fort spoke of sitting on a park bench at The Cloisters in New York City and tossing some 60,000 notes, not all of his collection by any means, into the wind. This short story is significant because Fort uses his own data collection technique to solve a mystery. He marveled that seemingly unrelated bits of information were, in fact, related. Fort wryly concludes that he went back to collecting data and taking even more notes. The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in a cramped shorthand of Fort's own invention, and some of them survive today in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania. More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but always began anew. Some of the notes were published, little by little, by the Fortean Society magazine "Doubt" and, upon the death of its editor Tiffany Thayer in 1959, most were donated to the New York Public Library where they are still available to researchers of the unknown.From this research, Fort wrote four books. These are The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932); one book was written between New Lands and Lo! but it was abandoned and absorbed into Lo!. ---From Wikipedia Read more